


Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

by igrockspock



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:59:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's jilted, she's pissed, and she's never really known who she is.  Now's the time to figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[character: chapel](http://igrockspock.livejournal.com/tag/character:+chapel), [fic: star trek](http://igrockspock.livejournal.com/tag/fic:+star+trek), [genre: gen](http://igrockspock.livejournal.com/tag/genre:+gen)  
  
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Christine steps outside the recruitment office, squinting in the sun. The enlistment packet dangles limply from her hand, and she clutches it tighter against the breeze. She needs to hold onto it; the recruitment officer had given her all sorts of instructions -- when and where to report and what to bring -- but her ears had filled with a strange buzzing as soon as she signed the papers, and she had heard nothing. Now she barely knows if the squirming in her stomach is giddiness or terror or both.

From the recruitment office, she steps across the street to a salon with a "walk-ins welcome" sign posted on the front door. It's the second impulsive decision she's made today.

"Cut it all off," she tells the girl behind the chair and surprises herself by not crying when a foot of laboriously grown and tended blond hair falls to the floor. She wonders how many women have wandered in here this day, this week, this year, looking for a new haircut to symbolize their transition into a new life. It's trite, she knows, almost unbearably hackneyed, but she feels liberated when she swings her newly-lightened head back and forth in the mirror.

"I'm single for the first time in my life and I just joined Starfleet," she tells the stylist without being asked, and she giggles a little to hear the words coming from her mouth. She can't believe she just told an anonymous girl at a beauty salon something she hasn't even told her parents. What she'd said was an exaggeration, but not a big one -- she was single for two months when she was 14, and there was a six-month gap between breaking up with her high school sweetheart and finding a college one to replace him, and then six years with Roger. She'd never meant to be _that_ woman, the one who couldn't live without a man, but then here she was, 28 and on her own for the first time.

When she steps out of the salon, she pulls her engagement ring out of her purse and throws it into a street side trash can. It's early in the morning and nothing else is in it, so she hears a little ping when the thin band of gold hits the bottom. Her stomach twists a little at the sound, and she wonders if she should dive in after it, but then she pictures herself standing on a street corner, elbow deep in a garbage bin, pathetically reaching for a relic of a man who hadn't deserved her. That mental image is enough to convince her the ring is staying in the garbage, right where it belongs. Roger hadn't had the balls to ask for it back, and hell if she was going to give it to him anyway. Pawning it would have been smarter -- that was what she had planned to do -- but her new life starts today, and she wants nothing from him in it, however indirectly.

She wonders if she should buy something for her empty finger; she's so used to the weight of the ring there that she keeps panicking and searching for it, thinking that she's left it somewhere. How strange that less than a week ago, that ring was the most precious thing she had and the thought of losing it the biggest tragedy she could imagine. There's an awkward tan line where it used to be, a pale band around the sun-darkened skin of her ring finger, announcing to strangers what used to be there. She's sure she's not the first person to join Starfleet after being jilted by a lover, but she doesn't want that to be the first thing she tells people about herself.

It's a nice idea, she thinks, a bit of jewelry to remind her that her new commitment is to herself, so she spends the morning browsing jewelry shops for a new ring. Shopping for a ring alone makes her feel strangely conspicuous, like everyone else in the store can tell she's a scorned woman with an empty ring finger to fill, but she keeps looking till she finds the right one. It's a bit vintage, with deep blue sapphires arranged into a flower framed by silver leaves, and it looks like nothing that Roger would ever have chosen for her. But when extends her card to an eager clerk, she jerks her hand back before he can take it. She can't do it: the ring will cover her tan line, but every time someone asks her where and why she bought it, she'll have to mention Roger, and she won't give him a reason to stay in her life for so long.

So she buys herself a cup of coffee instead of a ring and settles down at a table by the window, determinedly avoiding flirtatious looks from a clean-cut man the next table over. This was how she met Roger -- newly single and not really looking, but she'd caught his eye by accident, and he'd seemed so stable and solid and kind that she couldn't say no to a drink. The drink had turned into dinner, and dinner had turned into a regular Friday night date, and before she'd really asked herself what she wanted, she had a toothbrush in his bathroom and a drawer in his bureau and they might as well have been married. And somehow, six years later, she's the jilted and grieving one while he's frolicking around Atlanta with some sexpot who can barely keep the buttons fastened over her surgically enhanced 34 DD's.

She wonders fleetingly if she's making the same mistake twice, falling into something fast simply because it's available. She pictures her mother, forehead creased with worry, asking how long she thought about her decision to join Starfleet. "Longer than I thought about marrying Roger," she'll say, and that's true, but it's not nearly the same as long enough.

No one at the recruiting office had asked if she'd thought this decision through. They needed nurses, and all that mattered was that she wasn't a psycho. She'd been nervous, of course, and she'd carefully ironed her best skirt and a white cotton blouse before hopping on the transporter downtown. But she'd seen right away that she'd put in too much effort; she was the only one at the office at eight o'clock in the morning, and when she'd left at nine, the lobby had been full of rough-looking men rubbing their five o'clock shadows. Gloria, the only friend she'd told, had said it would be like this: "you'll have to jump through a million hoops to get to the Academy, but if all you want to do is enlist, it's 'if you're not crazy, sign on the dotted line and hop on the next shuttle.'"

That was exactly what she'd wanted, to be gone on an adventure she couldn't get out of before she'd had time to think too hard, so that's what she'd done. She pictures the weathered-looking man behind the desk at the recruiting center. He'd asked her only one question over his cup of morning coffee: why are you here?

"To learn something about myself I can't learn at home," she'd said without bothering to ask herself if it was the right answer for a job interview. It was true though, and that thought propels her out the door on the first small mission toward her new life: buying a regulation size duffel bag to hold the small possessions she can carry with her onto a starship. That one small accomplishment spurs her on, and two hours later, she sits on a park bench, scribbling a list of the things she needs to do to close her life here. The list is short and the tasks are small, a fact that might have made her feel pathetic and empty only two days ago. Today, it just feels liberating. Her stomach clenches again as she re-reads the short and messy list, and this time she owns both the sensations: terror, because this _is_ going to be the worst and hardest thing she's ever done, but exhilaration too, because this is the first thing she's ever done just for herself, and that already makes it the best thing she's ever done.


End file.
